We talk to Creative Director Vander Caballero to learn more about creating personal stories in games.

This past August Creative Director Vander Caballero turned his painful childhood experiences with an alcoholic father into a video game called Papo & Yo. While the idea of video games as a form of therapy isn't a commonly associated with the medium, Indie titles like Papo & Yo show that games have slowly grown outside of their comfort zone. I couldn't help but admire Papo & Yo's core message of moving on, so I sought an interview with Caballero in order to learn a little more about it.

1UP: Again, thanks a lot for agreeing to this interview... I realize this is your vacation time, and I apologize. I had no idea at the time of the request, but thank you.

VC: It's important for me to do this. It's been such an incredible journey that I have to follow it until the end.

1UP: Very good. I'm super grateful. I definitely enjoyed the game, which is a lot of what we'll be talking about today. I guess my first question for you... Can you take me back to August 14, the day that Papo & Yo came out on PSN? What do you remember going through your mind that day?

VC: I think it started by getting some great reviews. And I was hearing people say, "this is one of the best games I ever played, it's really emotional." I was really happy because of the good reviews it got. [Reviewers] were getting the emotional side. My goal with the game was to show hit that emotional side and I wanted to convey it. Hearing that people were getting it, I was so happy. A couple of hours after, we got our reviews in from IGN, a 4.0 ... I thought, "wow, I don't get it." But as I started seeing what was going on, I started getting into it. There were some bugs that got by our QA, but were caught by Sony QA, and they were still happening to people. We did a patch to correct them, [but] we couldn't release the patch before the ship date. So we released the patch on the ship date, but we realized that some people were starting the game without the patch. I understood how frustrated they were, because they were running into some nasty bugs. I was really sad to see that people were getting stuck on the bugs and they weren't seeing the greatness of it. That was really sad for me.

Eventually, after about a week, I got over it and I understood more about what was going on. I'd seen many reviews from site to site. I could say that I was happy about what was going on, because my goal was to break the rules. I didn't want to play with the same rules. Of course, when you break the rules, you have to be aware of what you're doing, because you're going to put people in uncomfortable places. They have to deal with that, and you never know how they're going to react. But what's important is that I did it. I didn't make Papo to please everyone. Put it that way.

A photo of Vander Caballero, the creator of Papo & Yo.

1UP: What about the feedback from fans, non-critics? What have you been hearing and seeing?

VC: I have never worked on a game that got so many fans writing me. "Thank you very much for the game. I really appreciate what you did." I got so many stories. That's what's kept me and the team alive. Some of them were really unique. When you've been hurt in the past and you've had to live with abuse, this game is going to grab you, right away. It's going to go deep inside your soul. Because that's what I'm leaving. That's what I left. That's what I lived through. If you haven't, it's going to bring you somewhere you have not been. People who have lived through that experience, they're going to reconnect to it, and they're going to open up emotionally to the game. They're going to recognize something. There's something beautiful in all that, and I love it, but that's one part that I find really funny. There's two comments that I hear from people who have... One of them is that the game is pretentious, and the second one is, how come Quico wants to save the Monster, because he's so destructive?

1UP: That's an interesting question.

VC: On the first one, the answer... It isn't. What people don't get about it is, when you come from an alcoholic background, the only way to fight alcoholism is to scream about it, talk about it. You have to talk about it. Because what happens is that kids who have suffered from an alcoholic father, through drug abuse or whatever, they don't go back to school and tell their friends, "Hey! Yesterday my father got drunk in the morning." Kids don't say that. They don't talk about it. But finally, when you talk about it, and you're so vocal about it, it's a way to fight back. It's a way to fight the secret. When I was being so vocal about it, I wasn't being pretentious. I wanted to say, "Look, this is what hurt me, and the more that I talk about it, the better it is." So, going back to the fans, a lot of fans told me this: "I'm really glad you had the courage to go through this and speak about it, because it gave me the courage to talk about it."

If you go to the comments of Papo & Yo reviews, there's always someone who comes in and says, "My father is an alcoholic." For me that's like...wow. Amazing. And the second part of it is, why is Quico going through this for the Monster? Some people did't get it. It's because that's what it's like when you're a kid. Your father and your mother are your livelihood. You can't live without them. You depend on them. People who have it good, who have good parents, they don't realize how dependent they were on their parents. Right away, when someone comments that that's something they don't understand, I get it. I think, "Okay, these people had good parents." They didn't go through that and realize how dependent they were on their parents.

1UP: Let's talk about Monster for a little bit, then. Back in February, around GDC, you announced a redesign for Monster through the PlayStation Blog. And that a friend of yours, Nilo Rodis, had some input and some changes were made. Did that have an impact on the final game? Was it a critical change?

VC: Yeah, it was a critical change. What happened is, at the beginning... We're doing an indie game. We don't have the resources of a triple-A game. It may look like it, but we don't. We just have a lot of experiences, which is why we set out to make the game we did. We have the budget of... We used three percent of the budget of an average triple-A game. Three percent. And then, of course, when you don't have that much money, you start asking your friends for help. "Can you do me a favor? Can you draw me a character? Can you make me a model?" You're always begging people to work for free. So the game got a lot of work for free from my friends. What happened is... A lot of my friends didn't live in an abusive situation. They showed me, and it was really funny, when they were drawing characters.

I asked a friend to try and draw the monster, and I explained to her his role in the story. She always drew nice monsters. She always drew really nice monsters. You wanted to get close to them. And I said, "No, no, this doesn't work." I worked really hard to push her to draw something more like my father... and it didn't work out. Then I asked another friend, who had a father that was a little harsher. A father who was more mythical and distant. And that got a bit closer. But in spite of that, they weren't representing my father. And because we didn't have any money I had to live with what I had. When we went to E3, we were able to say, "Now we've got some traction. We've got some money." That was when I met with Nilo. Nilo, he asked me, "Do you see your father in the Monster?" I said, "No, I don't see him." He said, "Okay, I'll do it for you." But at that moment I had money to pay him. [laughs] I think he would have done it for free, but I was scared to ask him to do it for free.

An art concept of the Monster after he was redesigned by Nilo Rodis.

1UP: Can you maybe give me one positive and one negative from that change? Specifically redesigning Monster?

VC: I think all of them were positive for me, because I could see my father. I could see the distance. The only negative thing that I see is... Sometimes people have a hard time getting close to Monster. But at the same time, it's really hard to put yourself in the line, because what happens is that... You want to tell your story, and you can't please everyone. That was my father. My father was distant. I couldn't get close to him.

I remember one time, a friend of mine... A year ago, we met, and I was telling him about the game. He told me, the only thing I remember about your father is that once, we were at my house. We were with some friends. And when I my father arrived, I turned to him and I said, "Shut up, don't say anything, stay quiet." And he told me about that, and I was like... Wow. I didn't remember doing that. It was when I was about 14. What it made me realize was that my father was even more distant than I thought. For that, I'm happy with the result of the Monster design. Some people can't connect with him, and that's the reality. When you have an alcoholic father... It's something that you want to get close to, and you just can't.

1UP: Looking back at some of the earlier artwork and animation that you had for Monster, I thought the change was pretty positive. Because it almost gave him a sense of power and strength you didn't see before. I definitely agree with that. It kind of made him stand out a lot more. Which was fine. It was something, ultimately, I think worked out really well for you. Still a little on Monster... I noticed in some of the early prototypes for Papo & Yo that you shared, and some of the videos, that Quico could kind of ride around on his stomach, almost. He could attach himself to Monster. I think I read somewhere, too, that Quico could even tickle him. They had a couple of interactions. Did I read that right?

VC: Yeah, that is something we had in the game. What happened was... We had so many mechanics to communicate the story that there were some we just couldn't polish. And imagine if we had so many mechanics that people started complaining about the polish. We decided to cut away some of those mechanics. I want to talk about this, about the polish. This is one of the parts that pissed me off. When people talk about the polish of the game... We had a little budget.

As a consequence, we spent our budget where we needed it the most. And where we needed it the most was, how are we going to convey the emotion of this abusive relationship? We put every single penny into that. Of course we couldn't polish all around. I think that what happens there... It's an indie game, not a triple-A game. Our team is 14 guys, not 300 guys. I really wanted to get a mechanic where you could jump and tickle him and all this stuff. But then what happened is, we just... Opening into a wider development, with a team of 14 people, we couldn't achieve that. We couldn't make it great.

1UP: I get the feeling that you were very satisfied with the end product, but there was room for a couple of things that you would have preferred to have put in there.

VC: Yes.

1UP: What would those things be? Would they be those interactions with Monster, the friendly tickling and such?

VC: If we had more money, I would have put them in. I would have done more mechanics for developing the relationship with the Monster. To make it deeper and more contradictory.

Comments (4)

@jose, please show this interview to mitch (ign).

I really think he missed the point of the game (which i really loved, and this interview encapsulates a lot of the reason i have for that love) -- and didnt give it the time/attention that it deserves for a well thought out (and therefore fair) review. I get the code/bug issues, but they were literally non-existent for me (on launch day with the patch), so to have so much of the review hinge on these issues that were fixed on day 1 makes it seem as though he didnt give it a fair shake (i dont think he did, either out of laziness, or misunderstanding of the game).

Just To Say

Didn't have any real interest in playing this game prior to the interview (missed most of the press for it, and a lot of the reviews I read made it out to be rather lackluster), but this interview sold me on buying it and giving it a play-through. I'm sure a lot of games have incredible meaning to their creators, but the fact that this particular game means SO much to Mr. Caballero, and that he was willing to give so much of himself/share so much of his childhood is very moving. Convinced me to give it a chance.

Title of Comment

I've played all kinds of indie games where I haven't fallen through the floor.

This part made me laugh:

"Or you meet the Shaman and you're asked to turn these statues, and that's when the game kind of implicitly points out its metaphors."

"Implicitly"? The game beats you over the head with its metaphors every step of the way. There's nothing "implicit" about it, especially at that point. That's the point where the metaphors just stop trying to be metaphors all together. And the response to that question really, really cements what I already knew. Caballero has zero faith in the player. Zero faith in the player to read subtext and zero faith in the player to solve puzzles. It's actually kind of insulting that he apparently thinks I'm too stupid for a game that doesn't spoonfeed me everything. And the way he still just blames every negative reaction to it on people just not getting it, even though it's basically impossible not to get it, is really annoying.